The Reflection

I am going to begin my writing by looking at some of the most problematic and most successful aspects of our submitted work and the effect collaboration had on it; I think a good place to start is with the problematic.  An issue that arises when collaborating on one specific text, regardless of its medium, is that every member of the group gets to affect the final product in a major way. On the surface this may seem like a welcomed circumstance, especially considering that a key aspect of the project was to collaborate- a baseline skill set for all media practitioners. However, the intermingling of everyone’s thoughts and ideas can lead to an incoherent final product that (to use music as a metaphor) that feels like a medley of different ideas roughly strung together, rather than a full song.

When working on our various drafts as we approached our final product, this became an issue, especially in regards to our medium (a newspaper) which traditionally has different writers writing diverse pieces. What we needed to find was a set voice that strung our work together. With three writers this was a challenge. Our solution was to pose ideas and edit everything together around a shared premise, targeting the tone of each article. In regards to our final product, it feels like a newspaper bound together by a point of view, however it is  let down by its stylistic diversity. It failed to read as a work entailing just one voice.

I think one of the most successful aspects of the completed work was our ability to focus on one specific aspect in regards to our central media idea. In the context of mediums we explored dying print media, a relevant concern in a digital day and age. After annotating various articles, I had many ideas come to mind, many issues I wanted to discuss and explore further-as did the rest of the group. That week we decided to look at Print Media, and explore it in the context of history and the future. The next week we realised this would be too big, so we narrowed it down to just Print Media, still a huge idea. However, the week after that we pinned our project down to the death of print media within the context of our society. The ability to narrow down the framework slowly but surely gave the project a suitable scope and created the potential for myself to explore a really interesting, and highly relevant issue (just days before writing this Newscorp shut down print paper MX). The practical framework of our project is reflected in our final product, instead of dealing with large, ambiguous issues, we tackle a singular one thoroughly.

In terms of creating the final product it was very hard to find even ground. In a different medium, for example film, gaining a sole voice can easily be created by simply pulling the images and various elements of the film together as a group- creating a singular, shaped meaning. However, in writing it is hard to change tone and language use as a group- and when it is done, the charm and individuality of the original piece is often lost. What we aimed to do was to find the sweet spot, where every article was a unique and different piece that appeared to be written from the same author. I think this challenge was good to have earlier on in the course because it perfectly highlighted one of the lesser known difficulties of collaboration.

Another difficulty in regards to collaboration is sacrificing ideas. There were times where I really wanted to add something that I thought was interesting and useable in regards to our ‘central idea’ which didn’t fully correlate to our group aim.  It is tough to let go of these ideas for the sake of our group, especially when you believe in them; however deep down I knew they couldn’t work. I learnt in this new media making environment that ‘biting the bullet’ is inevitable; and that surrendering ideas is vital for good collaboration- though this was tough the first time, I believe in the future I won’t be as precious with my ideas now that I understand the broader goal.

Online communication was very important in in this assignment; it allowed the group to constantly collaborate and share ideas. As we were annotating various articles in regards to mediums we constantly uploaded our various progress (and article work) to our Facebook group, referencing the chapter and author. Not only was this handy because we could see what our fellow group members were doing, but we also had direct access to the source which allowed us to (easily) read the same articles- which in turn prompted discussion.

Lastly, I would like to say how fantastic it was working with Stephanie and Niklas; they were both easy going, accepting and supportive of everyone’s ideas! 10/10